Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the concept of frontier as a temporal marker, this paper illuminates local population’s diverse and complex temporalities related to new large-scale infrastructures vis-à-vis the state’s hegemonic linear temporal framing of infrastructure development as future making in northern Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

The boom in large-scale infrastructure projects - roads, pipelines and airports- in northern Kenya and other ‘peripheral areas’, has spawned academic literature premised on an ‘economies of anticipation’ thesis. This paper moves a step further from such analyses of ‘anticipation’ to focus on the grounded material realities, namely the social and political lives of these infrastructural projects. In so doing, it responds to two fundamental questions: How is the local population engaging with these new infrastructures? What kind of temporal politics related to development are the infrastructures enabling and revealing? Drawing on the case study of the newly tarmacked Isiolo-Moyale highway, I explore the integration of the road into various development discourses both in the past, present and envisioned futures. In particular I look at the road as a foundational reference for two types of frontiers: the past frontier-with the connotations of disconnection from the political and economic center- as well as a ‘new frontier’ for development. Taking these two forms of frontiers as temporal markers predicated on the literal and metaphorical figure of the road, I illuminate the local population’s diverse and complex temporalities related to large-scale infrastructures vis-à-vis the state’s hegemonic linear temporal framing of infrastructure development as future making. The article is based on archival research as well as participant observation and interviews in the northern Kenya town of Marsabit, an important historical administrative centre of the Kenya-Ethiopia frontier and a key node in the new regional large-scale infrastructure projects.